Mission Flats (12 page)

‘Danziger was getting ready to prosecute this guy Gerald McNeese, or G-Mac, whatever his name is. But that was just the start. Really Danziger was going after Braxton. He was starting with one of the low-level guys in Braxton’s gang, then he was going to work his way up the ladder to Braxton. He drew this chart here. Look.’

Kelly made a skeptical grimace, as if I were a kook insisting that the end of the world was nigh. ‘Chief Truman, am I correct in assuming you’ve never handled a case like this before?’

‘Yes. Well – yes.’

‘What is the most serious case you’ve had?’

‘I had a mayhem once.’

‘Mayhem.’

‘It was a fight. Joe Beaulieu bit off Lenny Kennett’s pinky finger. They were drunk. It never got to trial. Lenny refused to testify. Joe was a friend, and there was a rumor he paid Lenny a fair price for the finger—’

Kelly held up his hand. He got the picture.

‘Look, I know I’m a little green. But I do have this job. In my town I’m the chief, for better or worse. I’m the only one they’ve got. I didn’t choose this.’

‘You’re green as grass,’ he said, as much to himself as to me.

‘Okay, well, thank you, I guess.’

‘There are hundreds of cops already working this case. You do know that, don’t you?’

He glanced at the newspaper he’d been carrying, the
Boston Herald,
then went to the breakfast table for the other morning papers, which he tossed one by one on the coffee table in front of me.
The Boston Globe
led with the story on page one. A two-column headline read,
SEARCH FOR PROSECUTOR’S SLAYER CONTINUES
. A color photo showed Danziger smiling behind his red mustache and owlish glasses. The caption identified him as
Robert Danziger, led anti-gang unit.
The
Herald,
Boston’s bad-boy tabloid, was more histrionic. It had a one-word banner headline,
DRAGNET!
, over a photo of detectives in BPD windbreakers questioning a group of black teenagers on a street corner. A local paper, the
Portland Press Herald,
and even
The New York Times
had picked up the story.

But the notion of following the case to Boston seemed logical, even inevitable. My response to the newspapers was a mute shrug and a manful sip of whiskey.

‘So what do you want from me?’ Kelly asked.

‘I thought maybe you’d like to come along.’

‘To Boston?’

I nodded.

‘I told you, I’m retired.’

‘Yes, but you knew Danziger. Besides, you said yourself, a retired cop is still a cop. You said you never stop being a cop.’

‘Yes, but even cops get old.’

‘You could teach me. You could help me.’

‘Help you what?’

‘Help me follow the case. Stay informed. Maybe get involved somehow if we can.’

Kelly shook his head and paced with his drink. He wandered over to the chest, where the photo of the dark-haired girl stared back at him with a somber expression. ‘Ben, look at me. I’m sixty-six years old. I came up here just to get away from this bullshit.’ He turned for assistance to the little girl in the photo, the late Theresa Rose Kelly. She seemed to shake her head at me too. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said finally.

‘Me too.’

‘You’ll be alright, Ben Truman. You’re a good cop, deep down.’

‘I’m not really a cop at all. It’s just a job.’

‘That’s how it always starts.’

The next morning, Kelly knocked and opened the stationhouse door, tentative and polite, wearing his ever-present flannel jacket and scally cap. ‘Can I have a word with you, Chief Truman?’ He glanced at Dick, who was working a crossword puzzle at the dispatcher’s desk. ‘Alone?’

I slipped on my jacket, and Kelly and I walked down Central Street. He produced a wooden billy club, which he had tucked in his belt. It was coffee brown with a leather wrist strap. Every inch of the wood was nicked and scratched. As we walked, Kelly twirled the thing absent-mindedly. There seemed to be two ways to do this: a propeller sort of motion directly in front of the belt buckle; or at the hip, like a floozy spinning her feather boa. Kelly executed both maneuvers with incredible dexterity. Who knows how many years of practice he’d had, how many beats he’d walked with that truncheon. Our steps fell in with the rhythm of it –
spin, slap! spin, slap!
– and I understood why they call it ‘walking a beat.’

‘Did they give you that thing at Central Casting?’

‘Standard issue, Ben Truman. Every good policeman carries one.’ He gave me a once-over, ascertained that I was not carrying one, and made a face.

‘Well, you can put it away. I don’t think you’ll need to whack anyone with a billy club in this town.’

‘It’s called a nightstick. And the point is not to whack anyone. It’s part of the show.’
Spin, slap.
‘People have certain expectations. That’s why doctors wear white coats.’

‘So you’ve never whacked anyone with that thing?’

‘I didn’t say that. I said the point of carrying a nightstick is to
not
use it. If you carry it right, you’ll never have to.’

‘Never?’

‘Never.’

‘Then how did all those dents get there?’

‘Okay, almost never. Still, it’s best not to.’ He inspected the truncheon briefly, as if he’d never noticed all the dents and dings in it. ‘If you are going to be a cop, Ben Truman, you can either be a fighter or a talker. I have always been a talker.’

We strolled along. From the window of the Owl, Phil Lamphier stared out at us. He was holding a coffeepot, swirling the coffee in the glass bulb. Hard to know what Phil made of the sight – a very tall stranger spinning a cop’s nightstick, walking a beat in a town that had never seen a beat cop; and me, hands in pockets, listening intently. I could imagine Phil passing along the intelligence over the lunch counter: ‘Ayuh, saw Ben walking with a tall fella this morning, ’round nine-thirty twas . . .’ In the hothouse atmosphere of those days, any rumor that concerned the body in the cabin was snapped up and analyzed ad nauseam. I waved to Phil, and he lifted the coffeepot toward me in a sort of salute.

‘What does a cop do,’ Kelly asked, ‘in a place like this?’

‘Wait, mostly.’

‘Wait for what?’

‘For something to happen. Something different, I mean.’

‘So how long have you been waiting?’

‘Three years, give or take.’

‘You’ve only been a cop three years and already you’re the chief?’

‘They weren’t exactly standing in line for the job.’

Kelly stooped to pick up a stray piece of paper, slipped it into his back pocket, then resumed his twirling,
spin, slap!
‘You know, when I started out, there was a sergeant in my precinct named Leo Stapleton. Leo was my first watch commander. He introduced me around, kept me out of trouble, showed me how things worked. Do you have anyone like that, a guy like Leo Stapleton?’

‘No.’ It occurred to me that I did have Dick Ginoux and my father. ‘Definitely not.’

‘So this idea about going down to Boston, you came up with that on your own. You haven’t discussed it with anyone.’

‘Right.’

‘Boy-o, do you have any idea what you’re getting into?’

‘I’m not sure what you’re asking.’

He stopped and poked me in the sternum with the nightstick. ‘What I’m asking is, do you know what it means to tangle with a guy like Braxton? Do you know what’s involved? Chief Truman, have you ever put physical pressure on a suspect?’

‘“Physical pressure”?’

‘Yes. Have you used physical pressure to obtain information?’

‘No! Of course not.’

‘Of course not? What if it were the only way to protect innocent life? Let’s say there was a bomb, and the suspect knew where the bomb was planted. Would you use force to make him talk, knowing it would save thousands of innocent people?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘Maybe. Well, would you endanger an innocent person in order to get a conviction?’

‘What?’

‘Would you force a witness to testify, knowing his life would be in danger if he did so, but also knowing that a conviction might save many lives?’

‘I don’t know. I never—’

‘Well, you’d better start thinking about it, Chief Truman, if you want to get a guy like Braxton. You’d better think about what you’re willing to do.’ Kelly gave me a long look.

He withdrew the nightstick from my chest. ‘Because there’s no other way. You can’t be a good cop and obey all the rules. That’s the dirty little secret.’

We started walking again.

‘Good cops do bad things for good reasons. Bad cops do bad things for bad reasons. Most cops want to be good, that’s the truth. But it takes experience to know how. Do you see what I’m getting at?’

‘You’re saying I don’t have the experience to work this case. But all I want to do is observe—’

‘I’m saying, if you get mixed up in it, you’ll probably get hurt. Or worse.’

‘When you say
worse
—’ Another of Kelly’s looks. ‘Ah.’

We went on walking.

‘Chief Truman, I came here to tell you what Leo Stapleton would have told me: Don’t be in such a hurry to meet the Harold Braxtons of the world. They’ll come to you when the time is right.’

‘In a town like this, I’m more likely to meet a woolly mammoth than a Harold Braxton. I need to do this. I need to. You’ll have to trust me on that.’

Kelly stopped to look up at the sky. It was a clear-blue fall day. He puffed out his cheeks, then released a long sigh. ‘Well,’ he concluded, ‘two dead boys is enough.’

He was referring to Braxton’s police victims, Danziger and the narcotics officer Artie Trudell. At the time, they were the only two we knew about.

There is no official oath for police officers in Versailles, Maine, so I had to make up some malarkey about ‘faithfully protecting and serving the people’ of the town ‘so help you God.’ It fell somewhere between the presidential oath of office and the Boy Scouts oath, but it did the trick. John Kelly, age sixty-six, was now the junior officer in the Versailles Police Department.

We decided to leave first thing Monday morning. That gave me a couple of days to make arrangements and pack my car, an old Saab 900 with a crack in the steering rack and a number of cancerous rust stains. I told everyone where I was going, although I described the journey in the sunniest possible way. I did not mention the Mission Posse or the gunshots to the eye. I was just going down to the city to observe, to keep tabs on the case. No danger ‘t’all. Diane and Phil and the rest all pretended to understand and believe me, and in the shadow conversation of things unsaid – the habitual language of Maine Yankees – I understood that they knew enough about Harold Braxton anyway and were worried for me.

I left Dick Ginoux in charge of the station while I was gone. It was not an ideal choice. Dick was the kind of guy who would prop his eyeglasses on his forehead then spend the better part of an afternoon looking for them. But he was the senior man in the department, and besides, there were no Eliot Nesses among the other candidates.

The morning of my departure, my father got up early to see me off. ‘I know why you’re doing this,’ he told me. ‘I’m not so old I don’t understand what you’re doing. Just you be careful.’ His beard was growing in. It was almost pure white. ‘Well, you’d best get going, Ben. It’s a long ride.’ I hugged him. His body was almost exactly the size of my own now, even a little smaller. It came as a surprise. I still thought he was a giant. He endured the hug as long as could be expected. ‘Look at us,’ he said, pulling away, ‘couple of fruitcakes.’

As for me, I had an inchoate sense that my life was veering, that from now on events – my personal history – would move along a different vector. For the second time in my life, I was getting out. I was leaving Versailles behind.

In a way, I’d already left – the moment I first learned of that dead man by the lake.

PART TWO

‘What have we better than a blind guess to show that the criminal law in its present form does more good than harm? . . . Do we deal with criminals on proper principles?’

11

In the year and a half I lived in Boston as a graduate student, I never went to Mission Flats, not once. The neighborhood was mentioned often enough around BU. The savvier students, native Bostonians especially, referred to it in a smirky, knowing way, but always with fearful reverence. The name Mission Flats was shorthand for them. It meant all the things dreaded by city dwellers: a place where one would not want to get lost on a dark night, a place where stolen cars turned up abandoned, where stray bullets passed through kitchen windows, a place to score drugs (if you were so inclined). But for all the talk, few of them had actually seen it. I suppose every city has its isolated, run-down districts. Still, it was surprising how few Bostonians – white Bostonians especially – had ever been to Mission Flats. To them, it was as remote as the Gobi Desert. To be fair, there is no real reason to visit the Flats unless you live or work there. The neighborhood is small. There are no shops or sights. The only institution of any distinction is the New England Presbyterian Hospital, which found itself marooned in the Flats when the tide of wealth receded in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Even the picturesque features for which Mission Flats is named have been erased; there is no longer a mission or a flat there. The mission, where John Eliot preached Christianity to the Indians in the seventeenth century, vanished long ago. And the flats – a marshy, pestilential fen surrounding the Little Muddy River – had already been drained and filled by 1900. The district is adjacent to nowhere and on the way to nowhere, dangling beneath Franklin Park like a rotten pear. It exists in near-perfect isolation from the rest of the city, a sort of blighted Brigadoon. But it had taken up a spot in the ether of the imagination, especially among white suburbanites who knew nothing about Mission Flats except that they did not ever want to be there.